Valve: DOTA 2 will be a new kind of free-to-play

Gabe Newell returns to issue of charging players based on how likeable they are

Valve will pursue its experiment with the free-to-play games model with a new plan to release its upcoming game DOTA 2 for free, the company’s managing director has said.
Gabe Newell claimed Valve is not applying a wholly conventional freemium model for the online action strategy game.

Usually, freemium games are made available to everyone and later monetised by selling optional in-game items.

But in an upcoming interview with Seven Day Cooldown, Newell said the game would be “free-to-play [but] it'll have some twists”.
"The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community?” he said, reflecting on a discussion he had with Develop last year.
Last year Newell told Develop that “the games industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products".

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...f-free-to-play